Put Up Your Fists and Fight
by BlueWhitney
Summary: After another of Tobias Snape's abusive attacks, Eileen leaves in the dead of night with her son. Seventeen-year-old Severus finds himself the only male in a shelter for battered women. Add his daily run-ins with high-school bullies and his crush on a bushy-haired classmate, and he's got enough on his plate. WARNING: Mundane AU in the extreme.
1. Knockout

**A/N: You know what, this is going to be just _the_ weirdest damned fic. Which is fine, that's never stopped me before. I've been working on a project, and I need some FF relief. Suffice it to say this is an idea for an original story I got when I worked briefly in a domestic violence shelter. I rooted around in my mind and asked myself, "What acerbic teenage boy could I substitute in order to turn this original story I may never write into a fic I will almost certainly write?"**

**Only my favorite one! (Cue singing: Snape, Snape, Se-ver-us Snape . . .)**

**I'd like to ask anyone who reads this _extremely _AU exploration of a 17-year-old Sev to go easy on me. I'll be the first to tell you I'm an American and am writing about a situation I encountered in an American, Southern women's shelter. Does that make Sev an American here (and a redneck woman to boot?!)? No, of course not. I'm just warning you that, while Brit-picking will be highly warranted, I'm writing by the seat of my pants for the sake of escapism. FF means freedom to me. :)**

**WARNING: This fic will likely venture into some dark and potentially unpleasant territory. The M rating is for language and themes.  
**

* * *

In a more affluent neighborhood—Godric's Hollow, perhaps—a concerned citizen would have roused himself to phone the police. Spinner's End was not Godric's Hollow, and it was not affluent. Whether it was a true neighborhood was questionable, since it totally lacked a sense of community. Colloquially speaking, it was a narrow, closely-stacked shit heap brimming with vice and apathy. None of its inhabitants were particularly keen on calling in the heat to clean up Tobias Snape's mess when their own was sitting conspicuously by, beckoning notice. So, when they perceived that the Snapes were once again in a towering racket, they shut their windows, had a few more drinks, and turned up their televisions. _Live and let live _was their charitable motto.

"Come on, then!" goaded Tobias Snape, king of his proverbial castle. On the first syllable, a fine spray of spittle flew from his mouth and landed on his wife's shirt sleeve. "Put up your dukes! Put up your fists and _fight_, you cunt!"

Eileen's lip quivered. She held up one loosely curled hand, not quite a fist, and shielded her face from her husband's wrath. She lay on her side, in the middle of a dingy, dirty room like a padded cell. Through a low opening behind her was a cramped kitchen. Off to one side was a set of doors, one of which led into a bedroom, the other a staircase.

"Look at you." The tip of Tobias' long, hooked nose curved further inward when he sneered. "You're pathetic. Do you know what that's like for me, to be chained to a pathetic, pleading worm? No wonder our son is such a spindly little weakling. Look what his mother is."

On the next collective breath, the spindly weakling entered the room.

Seventeen-year-old Severus Snape slammed out of his bedroom with the force of a small hurricane. The door resounded with a rough _bang_ when the tarnished knob hit the exposed brick. The hinges needed oiling; the door lodged in its extremity.

Sev was not summoned by any slur on his own behalf, nor would he have bothered emerging to referee a simple shouting match. He was used to both these occurrences and, having grown up to their tune, was as desensitized as humanly possible. But he had heard the fleshy thump of his mother striking the floor. The sound never failed to frighten and enrage him. Eileen was a bony, angular woman. Sev could not attribute the heavy thud of her landing to gravity alone.

"That is _it_. I've had it with your bullying."

Sev slipped deftly between his parents and turned his angry, harsh features up into his father's bloated smirk. Maybe it was a foolhardy move. Sev was not actually spindly, per se—there was some ropey muscle clinging to the bones in his limbs—but he was of comparable size with his mother, and she was in a heap on the worn, patterned rug. His father definitely had more bulk. Not the bulk of strength; a lot of it was padding. But extra mass on a cruel man was mass to be feared.

Sev was beyond fear, momentarily. His typically pallid face was flushed an ugly rose. Tendrils of black hair stuck up wildly and clung to a fine perspiration on his brow. His large nostrils dilated to enormity.

"I don't know what's brought this on, whether you've drunk yourself into a fit," Sev speculated through bared teeth, "or you've just taken it into your mind to be a lunatic tonight, like you are most every damned night—"

"Sniveling, squalling brat," Tobias flung at him, and now Sev knew it wasn't booze. His breath lacked that familiar, fumed stench. "Never knew how to mind your own business, did you?"

"_It is my business!_" Sev screamed. Later, he would wonder, as he always wondered, what he hoped to accomplish by such an assertion. Did he expect his father to suddenly see reason, shake his hand, and apologize?

Tobias took a swing at him. Sev was quick and reeled backward at the last moment. He felt a swoosh of wind brush the tip of his nose. Eileen cried out behind him, but there was no time to heed her. He leaped on the opportunity of catching his father unbalanced. In fact, he leaped on his father.

"_Stop it!_" Eileen pleaded in a wavering, unconvincing tone of admonition. "Both of you, stop it this instant."

They did no such thing. The man and boy, each with a clear, brutal intent, grappled in the center of the sparsely furnished living room. Eileen crawled away from them. Her tone became keening, regretful.

"Sev—Sev, _why?_ I didn't ask for your help."

He had long ceased to marvel at her apparent ingratitude. She meant well. If he would only stay out of it, he would come to no harm, and it would end all the faster. He recognized the logic, but he was transported by fury, as unable to shake it off as Tobias was unable to deal kindly with his family. In that way, father and son were perfectly alike, and maybe this was what frightened Eileen most of all.

Knowing all this, Sev ignored her. But Tobias saw an opening:

"You heard your mum," he panted. "Didn't you? You can hear _me,_ yeah?"

He worked his arm around Sev's throat, clutched his ear, and twisted it. The pain was shocking, severe. Sev couldn't reign in his resulting yowl.

"Say again?" Tobias dragged him toward the kitchen.

"Let him go," Eileen begged. The demand she tried to work into her voice was belied by misery and rendered ineffective.

At this point, while Sev strained with pitiful fury at his father's arm, which was smashing his Adam's apple back into his throat, Eileen re-entered the fray. She flung herself on Tobias' shoulders.

"Let him go, I said!"

Her husband easily batted her away. Sev's ears began to stop up, though he barely noticed it past the ache in the one his father grasped.

On the burner, the copper tea kettle started to whistle piercingly. He heard _that_. Sev's heart played percussion over the shrilling utensil. His eyes watered. Not tears—he had not cried since seven years of age, when he huddled in a corner with his face in his knees. Now, through the haze of wetness, he caught sight of one thing, and it seemed to ram itself straight through his vision into his brain. He could not dislodge it from his mind:

A coarse, crumbling loaf of half-eaten bread sat atop a cloth on the rickety oak table. From it jutted a wonderfully menacing old kitchen knife.

His knees came up. With a burst of strength centered in the flat plane of his abdomen, Sev wrenched himself loose. He thought he nearly lost his ear in the bargain. A second later, he wrapped his hand around the knife's wooden handle and plucked it, bread and all, from the table. The loaf slipped and broke into crumbs on the floor as Sev spun to face Tobias and—

He never knew what. He never got a chance to find out what his coiled instincts meant for him to do with the knife. To threaten. To murder. He never knew.

While he had reached for the knife, Tobias had reached for the thin, hot copper handle twisted into the top of the tea kettle. Sev turned into an impact, a forceful, scalding strike against his left temple. His fingers loosened around the handle. The point of the blade met the floor a second ahead of his knees and lodged there.

Meanwhile, the kettle's handle was too hot to hold for long without a glove. Tobias released it with a hiss; it hit the floor and rolled. The water slopped out, the steam found its exit, and the homey device stopped its demoniac shriek. As Sev sank into the darkness, he heard his mother take over.

"Hell," intruded Tobias' voice, full of triumphant sarcasm and muddled like eerie music, over Eileen's wail, "at least _he_ tried."

**[] [] []**

Sev woke to an achingly glacial frost on his face. His last memory was an excruciating heat. In his disorientation, he now confused the two. He bolted upright, flailing to fend off his . . .

Nurse.

"Oh, god," he groaned. His sudden movement resulted in a sickening swoop inside his skull. "Mum . . ."

His mother sat on the side of the bed in his small, square room. The walls were darkly painted and largely undecorated. A wardrobe stood in the corner, bare but for necessities. Even this miniscule haven had never felt like a home to him. But his mother . . . for all her faults, she felt like home. In her hand she held an improvised ice pack: an oversized, raggedy dishcloth stuffed with ice, knotted, and dripping. Sev wiped what felt like a river of cold water from the left half of his face.

"_Ow_."

"Shh, shh, careful," Eileen cautioned. She gingerly pulled his hand back and replaced the ice pack. Sev felt it leaking down into his hair. "You've got a burn."

Oh, that was right. The goddamned tea kettle.

"Bad?" he asked. And, to fend off any pretense of delicacy: "Am I uglier than normal, I mean?"

"Hush that nonsense." She smacked at his arm with her free hand. "Just a few red spots along your cheek. A lump above your ear. It's not as bad as it—"

Her unfinished sentence hung in the air: _Not as bad as it might have been._

Sev knew he had ended the confrontation when he collapsed. Bowed out by blacking out, in a manner of speaking. If he had not, Tobias would have continued to beat him until he gave up or gave out. Or—

Sev tightened his fingers into a fist. He could almost still feel the knife in his grip.

"What about you?" he asked, hoarse with the knowledge of a marvelous, thwarted possibility. His black eyes raked over her scrawny, pale face, so like his own despite the inherent femininity.

"Wasn't so bad. Not once I stopped going for the phone, anyway. He wouldn't let me call for help," she explained. "But he's gone out now."

Sev noted that she still spoke in a whisper, as though it were an ingrained habit.

"How long has he been gone?" Sev asked. He lifted a hand to massage his bruised cheekbone and winced. Doubly stung, he let the smart of his burn die down as he held out his knuckles and examined the mottled, purplish bruise puffing them outward. This latter injury, at least, imbued him with satisfaction. His father had not walked off entirely unscathed.

"Long enough." Eileen pushed her lank hair back from her ear and cocked that organ toward the door. After a moment of silence, she found her son's eyes again and searched them. "Sev, can you stand up? Try for me. We need to hurry."

He stared at her.

"_Now_," she urged him, with a gentle tug at his sleeve. "We're leaving."

"Leaving?" he echoed, and he uttered an incredulous snort.

This was a first, to be sure. Ordinarily, Eileen pined after Tobias when he left and parried every one of Sev's vicious curses with a rational-sounding, if hollow, excuse. Tobias Snape was not a _bad_ man—a disappointed man, yes, a tense man, always, and an impatient one, most certainly. Never a bad man, though. Eileen insisted there was some good there, though Sev sure as hell couldn't see it.

Eileen's heavy brow drooped. Sev saw he had hurt her.

"Leaving for where?" To back up the new seriousness in his tone, he lifted himself past a wave of dizziness and pain and set his long, pale feet upon the dusty floor. He felt pieces of indeterminate grit press into his soles.

Eileen began to bustle about the moment Sev stood, busying herself with raking items of apparel and personal hygiene from the dilapidated, peeling gray wardrobe. She piled them atop the bed. At his question, her hands faltered. A stick of deodorant clattered to the floor.

Sev watched his mother lean back against the wall. Her elbows emerged at angles; she held herself, forearms beneath her scanty breasts.

"I don't know," she admitted. Fear was thick in her throat. "If it were only me, I wouldn't even try. But after tonight, I . . . I've got to get you out of here, Sev. I could let him do this to me for the rest of my life, I suppose. I can't let him do it to you."

His male, adolescent sensibilities were embarrassed by the extent to which her words moved him. He fought valiantly against a wobble in his stubbled chin. Without proper forethought, he stooped to nonchalantly swipe the item from the floor. Wherever they were going, he would need that. Deodorant was a teen boy's best friend. But the moment his torso was at a 90 degree angle to his legs, the pain in his head surged and he thumped onto his knees, half swooning.

"Sev?" Alarmed, Eileen was at his side in an instant.

"I'm all right," he mumbled. He held onto her shoulder as he gained his bearings. When the room came back into focus, he let his old, familiar smile—grim at the best of times—stretch the thin line of his lips. "You think I'd let him do it to _you?_"

He grabbed the rickety bedstead and gained his footing. Once up, he tossed the deodorant onto the heap atop his blanket and spread his arms, offering his impressively wiry physique for her reassurance.

"I'm getting stronger every day," he joked, wishing it were true, "and I've always been smarter. No, admit it, Mum, it's him you're protecting. You know how it'll wind up one of these days. Me . . . setting my heel on his old, gray head and crushing it."

In morbid mimicry, he slid his foot along the floor and twisted it as if he were squashing a roach. Glancing down, amused with the mental imagery, he watched his mother's eyes widen in horror. He raised a bushy black brow.

"Sorry. Too graphic?"

"He's your father," Eileen reproached, "and we love him."

"_You_ love him," Sev jibed while his mother got up, dusted off her skirt, and moved to help him finish packing.

"He simply isn't safe for us right now," she finished, ignoring him. "Maybe one day, when he gets himself together . . ."

She shook his pillow out of its case and began stuffing in various items. As she voiced this wistful hope, as it trailed off into nothing, her hands slowed. Sev stopped altogether.

"We're not leaving, are we?" he guessed.

Eileen came back to herself. She looked at her son sharply, with the dueling expression of a disrespected parent and a criminal caught in the act. Rapidly, she hitched the end of the pillowcase upward and knotted it with her capable hands.

"Don't be impertinent," she scolded him.


	2. Child Intake

**A/N: I've been dreadful at updating for so long that I don't even feel apologizing is appropriate anymore, since an apology implies I might change. That said, I have decided to continue this fic after months of other projects and some mental wrestling. Updates should come faster now, hopefully one or two a month as I work on other things simultaneously. **

**This will be a somewhat introductory chapter, establishing Severus and Eileen as residents in the domestic violence shelter. If anyone takes umbrage at the fact that Sev is now _technically_ a Gryffindor, let me dismiss your concerns. I chose to call the shelter Gryffindor House to emphasize the requisite bravery of those who enter it. :) **

* * *

The nameplate read _D. Umbridge_ in pointy gold typeface. Eileen and Sev were to call her Delores, she said. Sev could not imagine ever wanting to call her.

"We don't mean to perpetuate prejudice," said Delores. She extended a hefty hand, and Sev accepted his ID back and tilted his bony hips out of his chair to pocket it. "But Gryffindor House is a small shelter, and we are grant funded. We must abide by the rules laid out for us. If we housed everyone, we could house no one."

"Doesn't matter," Sev said. God, the woman went on.

"It isn't that we believe men are _never_ the victims of domestic violence," Delores added, though the indulgence in her tone and bug eyes indicated she believed they must very rarely have been. "_Young_ men such as yourself prove they can be."

"Yeah." What did she want from him? Tears? He knew he ought to be grateful, but he was dog-tired. After leaving Spinner's End in the early AM, he and Eileen had bounced for three days from one overcrowded homeless shelter to another. Now, after arriving at a stodgy, two-story shelter reserved for victims of domestic violence, he only wanted to be shown upstairs into a bed.

"But sheltering a man in such a cramped house poses problems. For various reasons. Had you been one year older, I'm afraid . . ."

She trailed off and rolled her chair from behind her desk to a metallic shelf standing nearby against her office wall. She plucked a thick folder from the most easily accessible shelf and reached further down until she found a more streamlined one. The former, she passed to Eileen. The latter, to Sev.

"Minnie is our _vice_ administrator. She will process your intake," she told them. With these officious words, she appeared to dismiss them. Turning toward the computer behind her, she hit a button on the keyboard to wake the monitor.

_Process? _thought Sev, exasperated. _Good god, not another process!_ _Where the hell is my bed, you charitable old bat? _

Eileen was more tactful:

"Sorry—our what?" she asked. She leaned timidly forward with one hand pressed to her chair handle to indicate she would rise and be gone obediently the moment she understood where she was going. Sev saw and hated the inherent subservience in her form.

"Your intake." Delores blinked at both of them. "Your admittance forms."

She must have seen something insolent in Sev's look, because she held it for a moment with a sort of steady purpose. He knew the look. It was a kind of bearing down. He got it from Tobias at home.

Sev drew in a long, ragged breath and released it. His heart pounded and climbed his ribs like a ladder to his throat. He reminded himself that he was tired and annoyed and fucking _homeless_, by the way. Now was the time to pick his battles.

"Thank you," he said and got up.

Delores' vice administrator occupied another office in the same diminutive, managerial section of the shelter. There were two rooms in between the offices. The one they now entered housed a set of locked filing cabinets and a telephone. The other was not to be entered without a key. Sev looked toward the window on the door and could see nothing but a short, empty corridor lined with cabinets. The cabinets were covered in dangling combination locks. Locks all around him. The place was like a bank.

Or a prison.

He flipped open the shiny, green folder. Tucked into its pockets were a few photocopied worksheets. At the top of the foremost were the words, scrawled in a bold permanent marker, _CHILD INTAKE. _

Minnie's door was open. Eileen tapped it and poked her nose inside the office.

"Minnie?"

Minnie was a tall, spare woman with sharp eyes and graying hair. She emitted a grim sigh as she looked up.

"My name is Minerva McGonagall," she corrected.

"Oh." Eileen drew back an inch and bumped Sev with her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Delores said—"

"Yes, I know she did," Minerva interrupted dryly. "Be that as it may, my name is Minerva McGonagall. You may call me Minerva, if you wish. Your name . . ."

She glanced down at her notepad.

"Is Eileen Snape." Leaning to one side, straight-backed and square-shouldered, she found Sev standing behind his mother and ran her shrewd eyes up and down his length. "And you are the child. Severus, I believe."

"That's me." He lifted the child intake folder,

Minerva nodded and reached out a long arm. Sev and his mother entered the room and placed their folders in her care. She set Eileen's aside and opened Sev's.

"You look tired," she observed. Her tone did not indicate any particular concern or sympathy evoked by this fact—and yet Sev liked her all the better for it, after Delores' simpering apologies. "And dirty, quite frankly."

Sev and Eileen glanced at each other and saw how true this was. They had not bathed properly in days. Their hair hung in lank, greasy curtains about their faces. All at once, Sev woke the realization that he could smell himself. His elbow was propped along the armrest of his chair. Now, he tucked it self-consciously into his side.

"You'll want a bath and a bed," Minerva continued. She took out the topmost paper. "Most of this can wait until morning. Much of it is meant for a small child in the first place. I doubt you'll want to bother with the coloring sheet."

With a barely repressed smirk, she held up a hideous black and white cartoon printout of a black-eyed kangaroo and her joey. _What's happening, Mommy?_ the baby kangaroo asked, courtesy of a cloudlike, fluffy word bubble.

"Maybe later," agreed Sev.

"I thought not." Minerva laid it aside. "I'll get the basics. We know your name . . . your age . . . Do you have any allergies?"

"None," Eileen spoke up.

"Mum," Sev stopped her. He felt childish enough. The black-eyed kangaroo mother was staring at him, upside down. To Minerva: "None."

She nodded and struck a line through the blank space.

"Name and number of your personal practitioner?"

"None."

"I suppose that makes me sound like an irresponsible mother," said Eileen.

"It's not unusual," replied Minerva, entirely unfazed "Not for the women who enter Gryffindor House, at any rate. If they had access to basic resources, they would likely have no need of our shelter. Name of school?"

"Ah . . ." Sev glanced at his mother. His school was three towns away by now. Surely, they didn't expect him to attend.

"You'll need to enroll in Hogwarts High," Minerva moved on smoothly. "You _were_ enrolled before you left?"

"Yes, but I'd almost rather—"

"I'm afraid it's a requirement."

"Your funders sound like intelligent people," said Eileen, shooting a warning look toward Sev.

"It's _my_ requirement," Minerva said. "An education is the _most_ basic of resources. Remember that, Severus."

"Yes, ma'am."

He felt Eileen's glance of surprise. He was taken aback himself. Something about Minerva McGonagall and the chastening effect she had upon him forced the _ma'am_ from his mouth. He had never used the term in his life and hadn't planned on it now. He was silent, ruminating over this unforeseen development in his character, while Minerva took up the other folder and wrote down Eileen's basic information.

"You understand, of course," she said, passing them each a separate sheet of paper, "that confidentiality is of the utmost importance. It is for your safety—and mine—and the safety of every woman and child living in the shelter. Signing that document means you will reveal our location to absolutely no one, either while you are here or after you leave."

"Of course," Eileen agreed. Sev could tell his mother was somewhat chastened by the seriousness of such a vow. He felt it, too, and experienced an amusing sort of adrenaline rush while signing his name across the bottom. They returned the confidentiality forms to Minerva, who stowed them in their respective folders.

"Now," she said briskly, stacking the folders sharply against the desk before laying them aside. She folded her hands and briefly scrutinized each of them. "You have injuries."

"Nothing to speak of, ma'am," Eileen assured her.

"Don't say that," Minerva said in a tone Severus found rather more severe than necessary. "You must never say that to anyone. There may come a time when you wish to seek an order of protection against your abuser, and when that time arrives, you will _not_ want such comments floating about in the atmosphere. I can absolutely promise they'll come back to bite you in the—yes, well. Injuries."

"I suppose I got a bit bruised," Sev admitted. Gingerly, he tapped the scab on the side of his head. A hematoma swelled beneath it, and his burn still smarted despite the paste of honey and baking soda he'd applied before leaving the homeless shelter. The paste had worn off since, but his skin felt sticky when he pulled his fingers away.

"I don't know if I'd call Tobias an _abuser_," Eileen inserted delicately. "He's an angry man, but he is my husband."

"Mum, please."

"Well, we must give him his due," she argued.

"Ha!" he returned. Minerva gave him a muted, dry smile, as though she could read his thoughts. Tobias Snape's due was a roughly hewn stake smashed clean through his cold black heart.

"Shelter procedure is to photograph the injuries of every incoming resident," Minerva informed them, brushing deftly past their disagreement—as well as Eileen's initial one. "The photographs will be kept in your progress folders, which will be locked in our filing system. They will never be shown to anyone unless they can aid you legally."

"I'm sorry, progress notes?" Sev asked.

"Yes, progress. Our goal is to help our residents help themselves. We desire our residents' independence. Therefore, we will conduct periodic interviews with Eileen to determine her goals and in what measure she is progressing toward them."

His mother drew in a long, nervous breath at his side. Covertly, he reached out and clapped a hand atop hers—but nothing was covert in McGonagall's office, beneath her keen, hawk-like eyes. She noticed and tactfully pretended she had not.

Eileen cleared her throat.

"I have no injuries," she said.

A moment passed. Sev wriggled in his chair, twisted his spine, and got his mouth up near his mother's ear.

"Mum, what the hell? You're covered in scrapes and bruises."

"Down, Sev," she murmured, as though he were a dog, and it was just humiliating enough to work. He sank back into his seat, shaking his head.

"I recommend complete documentation, including photographic evidence," Minerva reiterated. "That said, you will hardly be the first to refuse. A new place is sufficiently unnerving without a total stranger firing a flashbulb at you. What about you, Severus?"

"Me?" He thought he shrank a bit.

"Yes. You. I should think you might agree to the injuries on your head being documented, in any case. You wouldn't have to disrobe for that."

"_Disrobe?_" How dare the woman utter the word in that casual tone? _Disrobe_. A nicer word for _strip_. A polite term to encompass the scrawny pallor of his bony white chest, curly smattering of sparse black hairs coming together on his abdomen to crawl their way toward his unwashed underpants. _Disrobe? _"Dear god, no."

Minerva smiled.

"I said you _would not_ have to—"

"No, no. No." _Disrobe_ was too fresh in his mind. He couldn't get past it, and suddenly he understood all too well Eileen's reluctance to stand on the other side of a merciless lens. He had worn the bump and burns as battle scars, but now they seemed more like stamps of shame.

"That's all finished, then." Minerva rose from her chair and pulled a heavily laden key ring from a deep pocket in her floor-length skirt. "For tonight, at least. These late intakes are telling on all of us. Unless you've an _extremely_ pressing need for new clothes, I'd prefer to stick to the immediate necessities tonight: some shower gels and a toothbrush for the both of you."

"That would be fine," Eileen said. "And I hope you realize—you and Ms. Umbridge—that Sev and I are very grateful."

"Indeed." Leading the way, Minerva took them out of her office and showed them through the locked door Sev had observed. In the short, narrow corridor, she unlocked one of the white cabinets. The drawers inside were full of hotel-sized shower gels, soaps, shampoos, conditioners, and so forth. From another, she removed toothbrushes, still encased in their new plastic, and sample tubes of toothpaste.

"We accept donations, or we'd have nothing," she explained, rationing their hygienic items. She began to turn toward the door on the opposite end of the short corridor, and then had a second thought. Upon opening a second cabinet, she passed Eileen a box of tampons. "Better prepared than unprepared."

Sev wanted to cringe. It would have been highly immature of him, but this situation, being admitted in the dead of night under promises of confidentiality, had set his entire being on edge. Eileen colored a bit and slipped the box half beneath the hem of her shirt.

The next minutes whirled by in a blur. The three of them went out the corridor into the shelter's main body. Up a narrow staircase. Here were the bedrooms. Sev saw no one, but many of the doors were locked, and he wondered about the women behind those doors—what they had seen, what they looked like. What they _had_ looked like when Minerva McGonagall pointed the camera at them and hid their dirty secrets behind the front flap of their progress folders. He hoped Minerva had taken their photos, at least. Asking a wounded pride to hold still inside a wounded body would have been too much, had Delores Umbridge held the camera.

Minerva showed them into a set of small, tidy bedrooms separated by an adjoining half-bath.

"I should warn you," she said, by way of _Goodnight_, "the shelter is going through a dry spell, but it can fill up rather unexpectedly. In the near future, the two of you might be obliged to share a room."

How perfectly dreadful.

Sev nodded. A moment later, he was in the strange, barren room, with its scent like too many sad, unwashed women. The odor of dead, stale air would have been preferable. On a dresser, he found a cellular phone, inactive but placed in case he should need to dial the emergency number. He smiled wanly and stowed it in a drawer, out of sight. He could hardly imagine any emergency more bleak, more claustrophobic, than finding oneself a resident of Gryffindor House.

* * *

**A/N: Next up, we'll meet some of Gryffindor House's current residents. Thanks for reading!**


	3. Cissi

"Call me Cissi," the woman said.

"I'm Sev." He pulled out a high stool and took a seat along the counter. The two of them, he and Cissi, were alone in the kitchen. Of all the rooms he had thus far encountered in Gryffindor House, the kitchen was perhaps the least impersonal because it was the least organized. Even as he watched, Cissi's delicate, trembling hand sent a few ounces of orange juice over the side of her glass and onto the counter. She looked around for something to wipe it up and, failing to find anything nearby, chose to ignore it and continued with her breakfast.

"Won't you have something?" she asked. She slid her plate of scrambled eggs and toast onto the counter and climbed atop another stool. Only one remained between them.

"I'm waiting for my Mum," he explained, with invisible chagrin. Finding himself alone with Cissi seemed a stroke of good luck. Mentioning Eileen made him sound so . . . juvenile. Ah, well. "She's in the clothing closet, picking out some things."

"Ah," Cissi said with a nod. A false-diamond stud in her nose glistened. Sev stared at the jewel, fascinated by the way it complemented her platinum hair and fair complexion. She looked as though she had never seen the sun. Which made the vegetation-green bruise on her cheekbone all the more obvious. Beauty made all the difference in the world, thought Sev. He reflected upon Eileen, with her scrawny face full of fear, and contrasted it with Cissi's cool eye and the bruise which sat in almost elegant repose like a streak of verdure rouge on her cheek. Here was a woman who wore her violence well.

What a truly terrible talent.

"There was nothing there for me," he continued slowly, coming out of this grim reverie. He set his bony elbow on the counter and, angling his body toward her, propped his face in his hand to watch her eat. "Not unless I wanted to cross dress, anyway."

Cissi _hmm_ed a quiet laugh. The chill standoffishness of her manner appeared to thaw and left Sev feeling as though he had discovered a window in a well-guarded wall.

"No," she agreed after she swallowed. "They stock donations for male children, but . . . well, I suppose you're a bit bigger than the average male _child_."

She flicked her eyes over him as she spoke. Ordinarily, he would have recoiled, ducked his head and hidden his coarse features and large nose beneath the blanket of his hair. Somehow, being here, surrounded by women whose lives were just as fucked up as his, changed things. For perhaps the first time in his life, he felt on equal footing with a beautiful woman.

He hardly noticed the sad expression which flitted across her face following her statement.

"I like your nose ring," he told her. He wanted to pay her a compliment, but anything more overt, more physical, might have been too much. Equal footing or not, he was all too aware of being the only man in the house. He feared being mistaken for the enemy.

Cissi was eating her eggs again, but she smiled a thanks and gave the diamond a self-conscious twist.

"Got it when I was your age," she informed him.

"My age?" He snorted. She barely looked nineteen. "How old are you?"

"I shouldn't like to say." She sipped her orange juice, and again he noted how her hand trembled upon her wrist.

"Come on, now. You can't be much older than I am."

"Not much, no. You'd be surprised, though. What a few years can do to you."

His grin died.

"Not that surprised," he said, rushing the words. Now he ducked his head. Clearing his throat, he came back up, broke the curtain of hair as though surfacing for air. "Still. Not too late to the turn the ship around, yeah? We're here, aren't we? You and me? And my mum?"

He added the last three words for the same reason he had complimented her nose ring.

"I am," she said. Heaving a deep sigh, she watched her fork shake for a moment before setting it on her plate amidst the remaining, cold eggs. "My son isn't, though—is he?"

"You have a son?"

"Somewhere," she said. "I lost him."

Sev didn't know what to say. He watched Cissi fold her hands on the countertop and mash them together in an attempt to still them.

"I'm an addict, Sev." She did not look at him. She looked at her hands as though waiting for them to spring into motion, ready to quell them. "Heroin. Child services took my son away six months ago. He's four years old. I haven't seen him since. I'll never see him again if I don't get clean. But it's been six months, Sev, and I'm not clean. And my boyfriend, my—"

She took a deep breath and finally turned to look at him.

"My abuser," she corrected frankly, "doesn't _want_ to get clean. Not right now. Probably never. Probably he'll die before he wants that. You, Sev—you have no idea what it's like. You're here with your mum. I'm here alone, and I'm totally lost. Lucius—my abuser—for all his faults, he's . . . Well, he's a bit like the needle, I suppose. He's what I know."

Sev opened his mouth to speak, but his throat was dry. Cissi cleared hers and wound down:

"Get ready for a rough time," she advised. "New faces, new rules, and their damned _progress_ interviews. Not to mention sharing rooms with strangers—"

"Oh, I've got my own room right now," he interposed, with an internal _Thank whatever god may be._

"That won't last," she said. She picked up her plate and went to rake the leftovers into the trash. "Mmph—bit nauseous now."

"You all right?" He swiveled on his stool to follow her motion. She moved elegantly despite the shakes.

"It's just a part of it," she assured him. "It's an improvement, actually. For a while, I couldn't keep anything down. Small mercies, I suppose."

Sev swallowed.

"You and I," he said, "we could be friends, you know? Help each other out a bit. With the adjustment, I mean. We're the youngest ones here, I reckon."

Cissi turned around, plate gleaming but for a few streaks of uncooked egg white, and beamed a smile at him. She was directly beneath the bars of fluorescent lighting. For the first time Sev noticed the shadows beneath her eyes. Now he could see it, those few years of age.

"Thanks," she said. A genuine warmth entered her tone. Even so, something in her eyes seemed to pity his naivety. "I could use a friend."

Cissi went upstairs, and soon after Eileen found Sev in the kitchen. He looked up to greet her, aware of the slight color which flooded his pallor. With his recent discovery of Cissi, he felt as though his mother had only barely missed catching him at something, as ridiculous as the notion was. He opened his mouth to bid her a good morning and smooth away any lingering awkwardness on his part, but he clapped his mouth closed when he saw Minerva come in behind her.

"And here, as you've no doubt deduced for yourself, is the kitchen," the older woman informed Eileen in her curt, clipped tone. "We stock the refrigerator weekly. The shopping list is there under the magnet. I'll ask you to record any item you notice running low, or it won't be bought. Also, there in the back—here, round the corner—this is where the keep the donated food. Canned and dry goods, mostly. We use these to prepare boxes for women who cannot come to the shelter but still find they require our services. You are, however, welcome to anything in the cupboard as well."

Sev slid off his stool to step around the corner and check out the cupboard with Eileen. The cupboard was looking a bit bare. He saw rows up on rows of canned green beans, a box of powdered milk packets, and varied cereals, most of which were probably stale by now.

Minerva shut the cupboard and gestured further down the brief corridor.

"There, you see, the laundry—" She stopped in the process of breezing her long, wiry length past the washer and dryer. Looking at Sev, she recalled, "Which reminds me—I'll dash over to our storage facilities this afternoon and see if we have anything there for you, Sev. If we don't, we will simply have to dip into our funds a bit. Write down your sizes and bring them to my office, if you will."

"Sure." He had never felt more like a charity case in his life.

"Now, _here_ . . ." Minerva reached the end of the corridor and stood beside the door. Its four panes, uncurtained, cast a harsh light over her severe face. Beside the window, on the wall, was a rotary phone of exceedingly ancient appearance. "Here is the residential telephone. We are not permitted to answer it, Delores and I. It is _only for residents._ Now, this is rather important."

She faced them full-on and pointed her finger at Sev's chest to gain his full attention. Quite effective.

"You must _not_ confirm _or_ deny the presence of any person residing in the shelter," she emphasized.

"Er . . ?" prompted Eileen, with a glance toward Sev, pleading for support.

"What I mean to say," Minerva explained patiently, "is that, should the telephone ring, the polite thing to do, of course, would be to answer it—and to record a message, if necessary."

She tapped her bony hand on a corkboard filled with thumbtacks and hung beneath the telephone.

"But in that process, should the caller ask to speak with a woman, you must not say that the woman is here or that she is _not_ here. You can only—" And she tapped the board again. "—take the message."

"Why is that, exactly?" Sev wondered with furrowed brow.

"Because to go into a shelter is often to go into hiding," Minerva stated, turning her eyes to the boy. "Many abusers will stop at nothing to find that which they have—lost. To tell an abuser where his wife is _not_ can be just as damaging as to tell him where she _is_ . . . in a roundabout way, of course."

"Process of elimination," Sev summed up deftly.

Minerva's eyes flashed, and she barely suppressed a smile of satisfaction.

"Precisely," she said. "That said, I recommend that any resident expecting a call awaits it, here, at the proper time. Well. I'll leave you to your breakfast, then."

Minerva swept past them, leading the way back into the kitchen. Before she could disappear and return to her office and Delores' supervision, Sev called out a final inquiry.

"How would they have the number?" he asked curiously. "Somebody who was looking, I mean."

Behind him, Eileen opened the refrigerator. He felt the wave of cool air emanating from it, heard her rifling busy through its contents. This would be the first time in years she prepared a breakfast without that feeling of walking on egg shells, he supposed.

"Often, they will have got it from a trusted acquaintance or family member," Minerva answered him. "Or sometimes from the resident in question."

"The resident in—" Sev's insides went cold, as though his skin had opened and let in the icy wave from the refrigerator. "You don't mean to say some of these women actually call their abusers?"

"That is precisely what I mean to say."

"Why the—why would they do that?"

"_Why_ is always the hardest question to answer."

Her smile was thin. Her sharp eyes wandered in the direction of the refrigerator door, behind which Eileen was busy retrieving a can of cream to mix into an omelet. Sev followed her gaze. From his position, he could find Eileen's face behind the door. Though she gave no sign of having heard the tail-end of his conversation with Minerva, he rather thought she avoided looking at him.

When he turned his eyes back to the doorway again, Minerva had gone.

* * *

Their first full day in Gryffindor House continued in the same vein. More rules and regulations. More acquaintances—though none so pleasant as Cissi, Sev was sure. He certainly missed her at dinnertime when, upon the entry of another resident with a toddler in tow, Cissi rose from her seat with a repeat of the sad expression she had displayed at breakfast, laid a gentle hand on Sev's shoulder, and excused herself.

A couple more women came in after the first one. As Sev sat beside his mother in the drab little dining area off the kitchen, the room was transformed into a hotbed of sexual tension. He did not speak, yet perceived he was the catalyst in the change.

"Is there supposed to be men here?" asked Merope in timid mistrust. Her son, the aforementioned toddler, was wholly unconcerned, busily banging a fork over the table's edge. Merope had a low voice, hoarse from little use. She also lisped, turning _supposed_ into _schupposed_. The left side of her lip was puffy, and her cheekbone a deep burgundy interposed with a short line of heavy black stitching. Sev studied her in his periphery—he was good at that—and thought of Frankenstein and other monsters.

"That's no man, Merope," contradicted Katie, a woman of surprisingly sturdy, athletic appearance, suppressing a laugh at the very notion when she perused Sev gangly form. "That's a boy. Don't be so easily spooked."

"That's a big boy," Merope remarked doubtfully, narrowing her swollen eye at him.

"There are big boys and small boys and in-between boys."

"My Sev is an excellent boy," Eileen supplied, in her soft-spoken way.

"Mum, please," he muttered into his fist. He could have crawled beneath the table. He was suddenly glad Cissi had gone.

"Well, you _are_," she insisted helpfully.

He looked around at their faces. He wanted to throw up his hands, shout _I mean you no harm! _What a goddamned silly situation. As if he had any less right to be there than they had. The worst thing about the reserve directed at him was its effect upon Eileen. Every reluctant word, every look askance, would drive right into his mother. He knew her. She had the thinnest skin of any creature in existence and would be looking for a way out by the end of dinner.

"I'm seventeen," he stated coolly, taking up his fork once more. At the same time, he nonchalantly tucked his hair behind his ear, displaying the marred skin where the kettle had caught him. Probably not all that impressive to this lot, but it ought to put them on the same page.

He supposed it worked. Nobody mentioned him again, in any case, except to ask him to pass the salt. He finished his meal, took his plate into the kitchen, rinsed it out, and tromped up the staircase. With a backward glance to make sure his mother and the other women remained below, he slowly traversed the hall, peering down at the crack beneath each door. Finally, he saw one with a sliver of light peeking from beneath it.

Sev cleared his throat softly, extended his hand—took it back, raked his hair back from his face, extended it again, and knocked.

"C-Cissi?" he spoke, keeping his voice low so it would not carry downstairs.

A moment of silence. He waited, raking his eyes over the door as though its white face were hers and would tell him something.

"Is that you, Sev?" she responded at last.

He smirked.

"Do I sound like a middle-aged woman?" he shot back. "Who else could it be?"

The doorknob rattled. Cissi opened the door and stood there, leaning in the sliver with her hip against the frame. He could not see much in the small space of the open door and did not want to appear to pry, so he kept his eyes on her face. A difficult task, because she had taken off her long-sleeved knit top and wore only a white camisole.

Enormous, mottled bruises in the bends of her arms. Easier to look only at her face now.

"What is it?" she asked him.

"You seemed—downstairs just now, at dinner," he stammered with a tip of his head toward the staircase. "You seemed upset."

"I'm all right," she assured him. She looked at the inches of floor between them for a moment—such few inches, reflected Sev, who could feel her body heat as surely as he had felt the cold in the kitchen that morning—and she heaved a sigh. "I got a bit sick, and—and the baby reminded me of my boy. My Draco . . . Six months is a long time for a child. He'll be bigger, stronger . . . he'll know more. What if—what if the things he's learned has sort of—sort of pushed me out, you know? What if he's forgotten me?"

She murmured this last bit as though speaking to herself. Sev, awash with a momentary tenderness which both scorned and embraced the hormones he could feel raging when he looked at Cissi, closed one of the inches between them. He stooped slightly to bring his face in alignment.

"He couldn't forget _you_," he said.

She looked up at him. Perhaps her eyes asked for more, or perhaps he was being foolish.

"Couldn't possibly," he continued. "There's—well, there's something a bit special about you. You know? Something . . . indefinable."

He wanted to reach out and touch her face, brush the bluish bruise on her cheekbone. He restrained himself.

"I've only just met you," he stated in a somewhat more buoyant tone, striving to break the awkwardness he feared he'd instilled in the conversation, "and I think you're memorable enough."

Cissi smiled and shook her head, pleased despite herself.

"Just you wait," she told him, but he was keenly aware of the pleasure bubbling in her voice. "All these women, coming and going . . . Give it a month, and I'll be one more blur in your mind."

"Leaving so soon?"

Cissi's parted mouth worked silently for a moment. She appeared startled, fumbling for words.

"Of course not," she replied. She glanced over her shoulder into the room, where he could not see. "I—I'd better turn in, Sev. The shakes, you know, and—well, it's all so wearisome. I know it's early, but—"

"No, no," he interrupted, backing off. "Please, I didn't mean to keep you."

She nodded, gave him another sweet, sad smile, and began to close the door. He caught her at the last moment.

"Cissi, I—?"

She peeked around the door and raised her white-blond eyebrows.

"Meet again in the morning?" he suggested. "For breakfast, I mean?"

"Sure," she agreed.

* * *

10:00 the next morning. Perhaps Sev was overeager. He had been waiting for two hours. A few women had already breakfasted—none of them the woman for whom he waited. At the newest footstep upon the creaking stair, Sev glanced around and was ashamed when another pang of disappointment shot through his stomach.

"Morning, my love," greeted Eileen. She entered the kitchen while fastening the last few straggling strands of hair up in the loose bun she wore at the nape of her neck. "You're up early, then. I knocked to wake you before I showered, and you didn't answer."

"I couldn't sleep," he dodged. True enough.

"Word is . . ." Eileen dropped her voice to a pointless whisper and leaned in as she reached around him to examine a box of cereal. Sev had occupied himself reading and rereading its contents during the long wait. "One of the ladies left in the night. She hasn't come back."

"Sorry?" His spine stiffened without his volition. He whipped around to look at her.

"Bit scary, isn't it?" Her eyes were wide as she sat down beside him. "Sev, do you think we're safe here?"

He wanted to leap up immediately and go in search of Cissi. At the same time, he saw his mother's eyes drift toward the short corridor, at the end of which sat the ominous telephone. He hardly knew what to do with himself.

"Mum, I—Mum, wait a minute. Yes, of course we're safe here. Who on earth would be looking for _us?_ Aside from—Listen, please don't—_do_ anything. Hear me?"

"Do anything? Whatever do you mean?"

"Just—here, have some cereal." He dragged a bowl from the cabinet, clanked it noisily in front of her, and rattled some corn flakes into it.

"Where are you going?"

"To see Minerva—about the clothes, you know. I smell like a dead thing." He sort of did, really, but how on earth could he launder what he wore without a spare?

Hurriedly, he scribbled his shirt and trouser sizes onto a napkin. A half minute later, he was rapping his knuckles on the door to Minerva's office. He would have burst in without waiting, had he wished to see Delores. Minerva did not seem the type to trifle with. The moment her clipped voice reached his ears, beckoning him to enter, he was within the small confines of her office.

"Severus," she greeted him. "What on earth can be so pressing at this time of day? Unless, of course, you've realized it's a Monday and you've yet to register for school."

Hardly.

"What makes you think it's pressing?" he retorted.

"You knocked _firmly_ enough."

"Oh." He was fidgety. Doing his best to calm his motions, he pulled out a chair and slapped the napkin down on her desk. "My sizes. Like you asked."

"Ah, yes." She pulled them toward her, eyeing him. Her tone was dubious when she asked, "Was that all, then?"

His feet fidgeted, but that was okay. She couldn't see his feet.

_Eyes like that, she can see right through me_, he corrected himself.

"Actually, I was a bit concerned," he said. "Is—is it true, is a woman missing? Only, you see, I talked to Cissi after dinner last night, and I thought I might see her by now. I haven't."

"Cissi," Minerva echoed. "Narcissa Black. This was her second stay in Gryffindor House. Do you know the average number of times a woman will leave her abuser before she leaves for good?"

He shook his head, somber.

"Seven. _Seven times._ Of course, I cannot claim to know whether Narcissa has made other attempts, but she has been with us twice."

"You mean . . ." Sev shook his head. "No, she couldn't possibly have gone back to him. She was determined to get clean, to get her son back. She _couldn't_ have."

"She did it once already." Minerva's eye was dry and steely, like her voice, like all of her. "You've a difficult path ahead of you, Severus. Finding your feet will be a struggle. You will have to fight. This is not the time to form friendships. This is the time to form character. I shall get you into school."

He hadn't the heart to argue with her. Slowly, quietly, he left the chair, left the office, and ambled into the kitchen once more. Eileen was where he had left her, hunched over the bowl of cereal. Sev looked into the bowl and was struck by how many soggy flakes were left. A suspicious amount, he thought.

"Mum," he said. "Please don't phone Dad. All right? Just give us a chance."

Her spoon clattered into her bowl. She went even paler than usual. Like a deer caught in headlights, she stared at him.

"I hadn't even _considered_ it, Sev," she breathed. Her eyes were full of transparent shame.

During the course of that week, he kept often to the kitchen, like a watchdog guarding the telephone. When Monday came around again, he was forced to give up the post. Minerva had registered him, quite against his will, as a student in attendance at Hogwarts High.

There, the real trouble started. There, violence found him again.

* * *

**A/N: **

I realize that, were I following the books at all, Merope would not be here with her infant son, but I couldn't resist making her a resident. I've pretty much abandoned all canon credibility, anyway.

I'd like to ask once again for you to please forgive all typos and errors. I'm working on some original stuff, and if I waited to post until I really had the time to sit down and edit it hard, I'd probably never update. Writing fic and non-fic at the same time makes me feel guilty.

As always, thanks for reading.


End file.
